We’re finally “announcing” OutFocusRED

What is OutFocusRED?

First things first. If you’ve never heard of OutFocus before, it’s an online magazine we founded in June 2014. Initially we designed physical magazines and published them digitally on ISSUU.com as a monthly. We published articles everywhere from science to cinema to sports. That was the mission of OutFocus – to focus on the stuff that was mostly ignored or what we believed in to be left out of focus. This was v 1.0.

After the first year, we began to think that we needed to establish our own site and build our brand. That’s when we launched theFeathers.in and theFeathers.in/OutFocus in November 2015. We ran our site on WordPress and a theme we could find. We call this v 2.0.

Still a year later, we realized if we are serious about building OutFocus as a brand, we needed to move it to it’s own domain. Like a parent reluctantly letting their child on their own, OutFocus.in finally became an individual entity. We also wanted to reflect our changes by building a strong brand value and custom built theme. This was 3.0, codenamed OutFocusRED. CodeFeathers has an interesting version numbering system where a version number v2.8.x is an update to the v2.x.x line, while v2.9.x is a precursor to the v3.x.x line. This is to ensure that the first release candidate of a major version is always v.X.0.0

Today we are in v.2.9.3. While this is not yet 3.0, it’s one step closer to puberty.

What have we got to do with it?

Everything. We took the starter theme _s and started development on October 2016 with a first beta on 9th October. After various design iterations we constantly kept redesigning until we found something we liked. We got feedback and tweaked all the time. User experience was paramount for OutFocus. We had to balance load times and brilliant UI. We call this design – Bold Modern. In future we will release guidelines and technical specifications for Bold Modern. We can’t do it now because it’s still a work in progress.

Bold Modern.

So what is Bold Modern? Bold Modern design language emphasizes content and functionality over aesthetics and has a bold, unforgiving UI. Highlights are prominent and content is legible. It was Bold and Modern. The title was natural.

Open Source.

CodeFeathers is a strong believer in open source software. We learned and grew up in this environment fostered by thousands of developers who gave their precious time developing powerful open source applications. So it was only fair that our first custom theme was given back to the community we came from. Hence OutFocusRED is free and open source and any magazine or blog website may feel free to use our theme.

We will talk more about OutFocusRED in upcoming versions. Visit our releases page: OutFocusRED. Or join the discussion at Github.